Re: Was the release of Debian 2.0 put on Linux Announce?
On 3 Aug 1998, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> There are other choices than the extremes you present. Also, I
> fail to see how a 3 character versioning system has anything to do
> with being easier to specify compliance to FHS and the LSB than a 5
> char numbering system.
It makes it easier when it can be looked up like this:
LSB-3.2: Red Hat 28.3, Debian 4.2r4, S.u.S.E 13.6, Caldera 5.2.7
If the application says LSB-3.2 on the box, you can tell at a glance if it
will run on your system. Imagine an environment with 30-40 Linux servers
acting as SAMBA and web servers in departments in a medium sized
corporation running mixed distributions. You can tell quite easilly which
machines will need to be upgraded for the application to run.
If you are developing an application, you can target a platform with a
known configuration and be assured that it will work no mater which
distrubtion the user has.
It is good for Linux. It is good for Debian. It is good for the
application developer. It is good for the end user.
>
> Oh, you mean that red hat and suse and debian and caldera
> shall have the same version number? Hah!.
Never anywhere in any posting did I even imply that. Where do you get this
stuff? What I am saying is that they WILL likely conform to some version
of LSB in the future. If WonderWare 54.2 is targeted for LSB-2.1 and my
Debian-13.2 system is also LSB-2.1 compliant, I know that application will
run on my system. If it is not, I can look at a chart that tells me which
version of of Debian I should upgrade to.
>
> There are differences between the distributions. Rather than
> attempting to hide tem by simplistic subterfuges like giving them the
> same version number, we should instead be educating the masses.
But they all share some basic common things if applications are to be
portable between distributions. These are filesystem layout, some range of
kernel version and some range of basic library versions such as libc.
>
> Or else you'll have to field questions like: I bough Linux
> 3.3.3 from Caldera, and Linux 3.3.3 from Debian, and how come they
> are not the same? How come Debian does not come with wordperfect?
>
Once again, I never said that all distributions should have the same
version. They should all CONFORM to some standard base version so that
applications can be made more portable over different distributions.
If portable applications are not a priority of Debian's than go ahead ...
die.
George Bonser
Microsoft! Which end of the stick do you want today?
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